In that post, Mario Asselin brings together a number of notions which are at the centre of current discussions about social media. The core notion seems to be that “influence” replaces “authority” as a quality or skill some people have, more than others. Some people are “influencers” and, as such, they have a specific power over others. Such a notion seems to be widely held in social media and numerous services exist which are based on the notion that “influence” can be measured.

I don’t disagree. There’s something important, online, which can be called “influence” and which can be measured. To a large extent, it’s related to a large number of other concepts such as fame and readership, popularity and network centrality. There are significant differences between all of those concepts but they’re still related. They still depict “social power” which isn’t coercive but is the basis of an obvious stratification.

In some contexts, this is what people mean by “social capital.” I originally thought people meant something closer to Bourdieu but a fellow social scientist made me realise that people are probably using Putnam’s concept instead. I recently learnt that George W. Bush himself used “political capital” in a sense which is fairly similar to what most people seem to mean by “social capital.” Even in that context, “capital” is more specific than “influence.” But the core notion is the same.

To put it bluntly:

Some people are more “important” than others.

Social marketers are especially interested in such a notion. Marketing as a whole is about influence. Social marketing, because it allows for social groups to be relatively amorphous, opposes influence to authority. But influence maintains a connection with “top-down” approaches to marketing.

My own point would be that there’s another kind of influence which is difficult to pinpoint but which is highly significant in social networks: the social butterfly effect.

Yep, I’m still at it after more than three years. It’s even more relevant now than it was then. And I’m now able to describe it more clearly and define it more precisely.

The social butterfly effect is a social network analogue to the Edward Lorenz’s well-known “butterfly effect. ” As any analogy, this connection is partial but telling. Like Lorenz’s phrase, “social butterfly effect” is more meaningful than precise. One thing which makes the phrase more important for me is the connection with the notion of a “social butterfly,” which is both a characteristic I have been said to have and a concept I deem important in social science.

I define social butterflies as people who connect to diverse network clusters. Community enthusiast Christine Prefontaine defined social butterflies within (clustered) networks, but I think it’s useful to separate out network clusters. A social butterfly’s network is rather sparse as, on the whole, a small number of people in it have direct connections with one another. But given the topography of most social groups, there likely are clusters within that network. The social butterfly connects these clusters. When the social butterfly is the only node which can connect these clusters directly, her/his “influence” can be as strong as that of a central node in one of these clusters since s/he may be able to bring some new element from one cluster to another.

I like the notion of “repercussion” because it has an auditory sense and it resonates with all sorts of notions I think important without being too buzzwordy. For instance, as expressions like “ripple effect” and “domino effect” are frequently used, they sound like clichés. Obviously, so does “butterfly effect” but I like puns too much to abandon it. From a social perspective, the behaviour of a social butterfly has important “repercussions” in diverse social groups.

Since I define myself as a social butterfly, this all sounds self-serving. And I do pride myself in being a “connector.” Not only in generational terms (I dislike some generational metaphors). But in social terms. I’m rarely, if ever, central to any group. But I’m also especially good at serving as a contact between people from different groups.

Yay, me! 🙂

My thinking about the social butterfly effect isn’t an attempt to put myself on some kind of pedestal. Social butterflies typically don’t have much “power” or “prestige.” Our status is fluid/precarious. I enjoy being a social butterfly but I don’t think we’re better or even more important than anybody else. But I do think that social marketers and other people concerned with “influence” should take us into account.

I say all of this as a social scientist. Some parts of my description are personalized but I’m thinking about a broad stance “from society’s perspective.” In diverse contexts, including this blog, I have been using “sociocentric” in at least three distinct senses: class-based ethnocentrism, a special form of “altrocentrism,” and this “society-centred perspective.” These meanings are distinct enough that they imply homonyms. Social network analysis is typically “egocentric” (“ego-centred”) in that each individual is the centre of her/his own network. This “egocentricity” is both a characteristic of social networks in opposition to other social groups and a methodological issue. It specifically doesn’t imply egotism but it does imply a move away from pre-established social categories. In this sense, social network analysis isn’t “society-centred” and it’s one reason I put so much emphasis on social networks.

In the context of discussions of influence, however, there is a “society-centredness” which needs to be taken into account. The type of “influence” social marketers and others are so interested in relies on defined “spaces.” In some ways, if “so-and-so is influential,” s/he has influence within a specific space, sphere, or context, the boundaries of which may be difficult to define. For marketers, this can bring about the notion of a “market,” including in its regional and demographic senses. This seems to be the main reason for the importance of clusters but it also sounds like a way to recuperate older marketing concepts which seem outdated online.

A related point is the “vertical” dimension of this notion of “influence.” Whether or not it can be measured accurately, it implies some sort of scale. Some people are at the top of the scale, they’re influencers. Those at the bottom are the masses, since we take for granted that pyramids are the main models for social structure. To those of us who favour egalitarianism, there’s something unpalatable about this.

And I would say that online contacts tend toward some form of egalitarianism. To go back to one of my favourite buzzphrases, the notion of attention relates to reciprocity:

It’s an attention economy: you need to pay attention to get attention.

This is one thing journalism tends to “forget.” Relationships between journalists and “people” are asymmetrical. Before writing this post, I read Brian Storm’s commencement speech for the Mizzou J-School. While it does contain some interesting tidbits about the future of journalism, it positions journalists (in this case, recent graduates from an allegedly prestigious school of journalism) away from the masses. To oversimplify, journalists are constructed as those who capture people’s attention by the quality of their work, not by any two-way relationship. Though they rarely discuss this, journalists, especially those in mainstream media, typically perceive themselves as influencers.

Attention often has a temporal dimension which relates to journalism’s obsession with time. Journalists work in time-sensitive contexts, news are timely, audiences spend time with journalistic contents, and journalists fight for this audience time as a scarce resource, especially in connection to radio and television. Much of this likely has to do with the fact that journalism is intimately tied to advertising.

As I write this post, I hear on a radio talk show a short discussion about media coverage of Africa. The topic wakes up the africanist in me. The time devoted to Africa in almost any media outside of Africa is not only very limited but spent on very specific issues having to do with Africa. In mainstream media, Africa only “matters” when major problems occur. Even though most parts of Africa are peaceful and there many fabulously interesting things occuring throughout the continent, Africa is the “forgotten” continent.

A connection I perceive is that, regardless of any other factor, Africans are taken to not be “influential.” What makes this notion especially strange to an africanist is that influence tends to be a very important matter throughout the continent. Most Africans I know or have heard about have displayed a very nuanced and acute sense of “influence” to the extent that “power” often seems less relevant when working in Africa than different elements of influence. I know full well that, to outsiders to African studies, these claims may sound far-fetched. But there’s a lot to be said about the importance of social networks in Africa and this could help refine a number of notions that I have tagged in this post.

When I came out against privilege, over a month ago, I wasn’t thinking about libraries. But, last week, while running some errands at three local libraries (within an hour), I got to think about library privileges.

During that day, I first started thinking about library privileges because I was renewing my CREPUQ card at Concordia. With that card, graduate students and faculty members at a university in Quebec are able to get library privileges at other universities, a nice “perk” that we have. While renewing my card, I was told (or, more probably, reminded) that the card now gives me borrowing privileges at any university library in Canada through CURBA (Canadian University Reciprocal Borrowing Agreement).

My gut reaction: “Aw-sum!” (I was having a fun day).

It got me thinking about what it means to be an academic in Canada. Because I’ve also spent part of my still short academic career in the United States, I tend to compare the Canadian academe to US academic contexts. And while there are some impressive academic consortia in the US, I don’t think that any of them may offer as wide a set of library privileges as this one. If my count is accurate, there are 77 institutions involved in CURBA. University systems and consortia in the US typically include somewhere between ten and thirty institutions, usually within the same state or region. Even if members of both the “UC System” and “CalState” have similar borrowing privileges, it would only mean 33 institutions, less than half of CURBA (though the population of California is about 20% more than that of Canada as a whole). Some important university consortia through which I’ve had some privileges were the CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation), a group of twelve Midwestern universities, and the BLC (Boston Library Consortium), a group of twenty university in New England. Even with full borrowing privileges in all three groups of university libraries, an academic would only have access to library material from 65 institutions.

Of course, the number of institutions isn’t that relevant if the libraries themselves have few books. But my guess is that the average size of a Canadian university’s library collection is quite comparable to its US equivalents, including in such well-endowed institutions as those in the aforementioned consortia and university systems. What’s more, I would guess that there might be a broader range of references across Canadian universities than in any region of the US. Not to mention that BANQ (Quebec’s national library and archives) are part of CURBA and that their collections overlap very little with a typical university library.

So, I was thinking about access to an extremely wide range of references given to graduate students and faculty members throughout Canada. We get this very nice perk, this impressive privilege, and we pretty much take it for granted.

Which eventually got me to think about my problem with privilege. Privilege implies a type of hierarchy with which I tend to be uneasy. Even (or especially) when I benefit from a top position. “That’s all great for us but what about other people?”

In this case, there are obvious “Others” like undergraduate students at Canadian institutions, Canadian non-academics, and scholars at non-Canadian institutions. These are very disparate groups but they are all denied something.

Canadian undergrads are the most direct “victims”: they participate in Canada’s academe, like graduate students and faculty members, yet their access to resources is severely limited by comparison to those of us with CURBA privileges. Something about this strikes me as rather unfair. Don’t undegrads need access as much as we do? Is there really such a wide gap between someone working on an honour’s thesis at the end of a bachelor’s degree and someone starting work on a master’s thesis that the latter requires much wider access than the former? Of course, the main rationale behind this discrepancy in access to library material probably has to do with sheer numbers: there are many undergraduate students “fighting for the same resources” and there are relatively few graduate students and faculty members who need access to the same resources. Or something like that. It makes sense but it’s still a point of tension, as any matter of privilege.

The second set of “victims” includes Canadians who happen to not be affiliated directly with an academic institution. While it may seem that their need for academic resources are more limited than those of students, many people in this category have a more unquenchable “thirst for knowledge” than many an academic. In fact, there are people in this category who could probably do a lot of academically-relevant work “if only they had access.” I mostly mean people who have an academic background of some sort but who are currently unaffiliated with formal institutions. But the “broader public” counts, especially when a specific topic becomes relevant to them. These are people who take advantage of public libraries but, as mentioned in the BANQ case, public and university libraries don’t tend to overlap much. For instance, it’s quite unlikely that someone without academic library privileges would have been able to borrow Visual Information Processing (Chase, William 1973), a proceedings book that I used as a source for a recent blogpost on expertise. Of course, “the public” is usually allowed to browse books in most university libraries in North America (apart from Harvard). But, depending on other practical factors, borrowing books can be much more efficient than browsing them in a library. I tend to hear from diverse people who would enjoy some kind of academic status for this very reason: library privileges matter.

A third category of “victims” of CURBA privileges are non-Canadian academics. Since most of them may only contribute indirectly to Canadian society, why should they have access to Canadian resources? As any social context, the national academe defines insiders and outsiders. While academics are typically inclusive, this type of restriction seems to make sense. Yet many academics outside of Canada could benefit from access to resources broadly available to Canadian academics. In some cases, there are special agreements to allow outside scholars to get temporary access to local, regional, or national resources. Rather frequently, these agreements come with special funding, the outside academic being a special visitor, sometimes with even better access than some local academics. I have very limited knowledge of these agreements (apart from infrequent discussions with colleagues who benefitted from them) but my sense is that they are costly, cumbersome, and restrictive. Access to local resources is even more exclusive a privilege in this case than in the CURBA case.

Which brings me to my main point about the issue: we all need open access.

When I originally thought about how impressive CURBA privileges were, I was thinking through the logic of the physical library. In a physical library, resources are scarce, access to resources need to be controlled, and library privileges have a high value. In fact, it costs an impressive amount of money to run a physical library. The money universities invest in their libraries is relatively “inelastic” and must figure quite prominently in their budgets. The “return” on that investment seems to me a bit hard to measure: is it a competitive advantage, does a better-endowed library make a university more cost-effective, do university libraries ever “recoup” any portion of the amounts spent?

Contrast all of this with a “virtual” library. My guess is that an online collection of texts costs less to maintain than a physical library by any possible measure. Because digital data may be copied at will, the notion of “scarcity” makes little sense online. Distributing millions of copies of a digital text doesn’t make the original text unavailable to anyone. As long as the distribution system is designed properly, the “transaction costs” in distributing a text of any length are probably much less than those associated with borrowing a book. And the differences between “browsing” and “borrowing,” which do appear significant with physical books, seem irrelevant with digital texts.

These are all well-known points about online distribution. And they all seem to lead to the same conclusion: “information wants to be free.” Not “free as in beer.” Maybe not even “free as in speech.” But “free as in unchained.”

Open access to academic resources is still a hot topic. Though I do consider myself an advocate of “OA” (the “Open Access movement”), what I mean here isn’t so much about OA as opposed to TA (“toll-access”) in the case of academic journals. Physical copies of periodicals may usually not be borrowed, regardless of library privileges, and online resources are typically excluded from borrowing agreements between institutions. The connection between OA and my perspective on library privileges is that I think the same solution could solve both issues.

I’ve been thinking about a “global library” for a while. Like others, the Library of Alexandria serves as a model but texts would be online. It sounds utopian but my main notion, there, is that “library privileges” would be granted to anyone. Not only senior scholars at accredited academic institutions. Anyone. Of course, the burden of maintaining that global library would also be shared by anyone.

There are many related models, apart from the Library of Alexandria: French «Encyclopédistes» through the Englightenment, public libraries, national libraries (including the Library of Congress), Tim Berners-Lee’s original “World Wide Web” concept, Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive, Google Books, etc. Though these models differ, they all point to the same basic idea: a “universal” collection with the potential for “universal” access. In historical perspective, this core notion of a “universal library” seems relatively stable.

Of course, there are many obstacles to a “global” or “universal” library. Including issues having to do with conflicts between social groups across the Globe or the current state of so-called “intellectual property.” These are all very tricky and I don’t think they can be solved in any number of blogposts. The main thing I’ve been thinking about, in this case, is the implications of a global library in terms of privileges.

Come to think of it, it’s possible that much of the resistance to a global library have to do with privilege: unlike me, some people enjoy privilege.

Hello my name is Todd and i am happy to assist you. I understand that you would like a refund for your gift card that you purchased without knowing that you couldn’t purchase applications unfortunately i am unable to approve a refund because once a Gift Card has been redeemed, it no longer has any value. The store credit on the card has been completely transferred to the account it was redeemed to. I did some research and i came across this link where apple customers go and send feedback about issues they have experienced and I think you may find this informative.

So it seems that the restriction is due to Canadian law. Which makes it even more surprising that none of the documentation available to users in the process of redeeming the code contains no mention of this restriction. I find Apple’s lack of attention to this issue a tad bit more troubling in context.]

I’m usually rather levelheaded and I don’t get angry that easily.

Apparently, iTunes gift cards can’t be used on the App Store portion of the Canadian version of the iTunes store. It seems that, in the US, gift cards can in fact be used on the App Store.

This is quite disappointing.

Because of diverse international moves, I currently don’t have access to a valid credit card in my own name. During this time, I’ve noticed a few applications on the iTunes App Store that I would like to purchase but, since I didn’t have a credit card, I couldn’t purchase them. I do have a Canadian Paypal account but the Canadian iTunes doesn’t accept Paypal payments (while the US version of iTunes does). I thought that Paypal was able to provide temporary credit card numbers but it seems that I was mistaken.

So I thought about using an iTunes gift card.

And I started thinking about this as a gift to myself. Not exactly a reward for good behaviour but a “feel good” purchase. I don’t tend to be that much into consumerism but I thought an iTunes gift card would make sense.

So, today, I went to purchase an iTunes gift card for use on the App Store portion of the iTunes Store.

I felt quite good about it. The weather today is bad enough that we are advised to stay home unless necessary. There’s ice all over and the sidewalks are extremely slippery. But I felt good about going to a store to purchase an iTunes gift card. In a way, I was “earning” this card. Exercising a lot of caution, I went to a pharmacy which, I thought, would sell iTunes gift cards. I know that Jean Coutu sells them. Turns out that this smaller pharmacy doesn’t. So I was told to go to a «dépanneur» (convenience store) a bit further, which did have iTunes gift cards. Had I known, I would probably have gone to another convenience store: Laval, like other places in Quebec, has dépanneurs everywhere. Still, since that dépanneur was rather close and is one of the bigger ones in the neighbourhood, I thought I’d go to that one.

And I did find iTunes gift cards. Problem is, the only ones they had were 25$. I would have preferred a 15$ card since I only need a few dollars for the main purchase I want to make on the iTunes App Store. But, given the context, I thought I’d buy the 25$ card. This is pretty much as close as I can get to an “upsell” and I thought about it before doing it. It’s not an impulse purchase since I’ve been planning to get an iTunes gift card for weeks, if not months. But it’s more money than I thought I would spend on iTunes, for a while.

Coming back home, I felt quite good. Not exactly giddy, but I got something close to a slight “consumption rush.” I so irregularly do purchases like these that it was a unique occasion to partake into consumer culture.

As I was doing all this, I was listening to the latest episode of The Word Nerds which is about currency (both linguistic and monetary). It was very difficult to walk but it all felt quite fun. I wasn’t simply running an errand, I was being self-indulgent.

In fact, I went to get French fries at a local greasy spoon, known for its fries. It may be an extreme overstatement but a commenter on Google Maps calls this place “Best Restaurant in North America.” The place was built, very close to my childhood home, the year I was born. It was rebuilt during the year and now looks like a typical Quebec greasy spoon chain. But their fries are still as good as they were before. And since “self-indulgence” was the theme of my afteroon, it all seemed fitting.

Speaking of indulgence, what I wanted to purchase is a game: Enjoy Sudoku. I’ve been playing with the free “Enjoy Sudoku Daily” version for a while. This free version has a number of restrictions that the 2.99$ version doesn’t have. If I had had access to a credit card at the time, I would have purchased the “premium version” right away. And I do use the free version daily, so I’ve been giving this a fair bit of thought in the meantime.

So imagine my deception when, after redeeming my iTunes gift card, I noticed that I wasn’t able to purchase Enjoy Sudoku. The gift certificate amount shows up in iTunes but, when I try to purchase the game, I get a message saying that I need to change my payment information. I tried different things, including redeeming the card again (which obviously didn’t work). I tried with other applications, even though I didn’t really have a second one which I really wanted to buy. I read the fine print on the card itself, on the card’s packaging, and on the Apple website. Couldn’t find any explanation. Through Web searches, I notice that gift card purchases apparently work on the App Store portion of the US iTunes site. Of course, that web forum might be wrong, but it’d be surprising if somebody else hadn’t posted a message denying the possibility to use iTunes gift cards on App Store given the context (a well-known Mac site, a somewhat elaborate discussion, this habit of forum posters and bloggers to pinpoint any kind of issue with Apple or other corporations…).

The legal fine print on the Apple Canada website does have one sentence which could be interpreted to legally cover the restriction of applications from purchases made with the iTunes gift card:

Not all products may be available.

This type of catch-all phrasing is fairly common in legalese and I do understand that it protects Apple from liability over products which cannot be purchased with an iTunes gift card, for whatever reason. But no mention is made of which products might be unavailable for purchase with an iTunes gift card. In fact, the exact same terms are in the fine print for the US version of the iTunes store. While it makes a lot of sense to embed such a statement in legal fine print, making people pay direct attention to this statement may have negative consequences for Apple as it can sound as if iTunes gift cards are unreliable or insufficient.

I eventually found an iTunes FAQ on the Canadian version of Apple support which explicitly mentions this restriction:

What can I buy with an iTunes Gift Card or iTunes Gift Certificate?

iTunes Gift Cards and iTunes Gift Certificates can be used to purchase music, videos and audio books from the iTunes Store. iTunes Gift Cards and iTunes Gift Certificates may not be used on the Canadian store to purchase applications and games. iTunes Gift Cards and iTunes Gift Certificates are not accepted for online Apple Store purchases.

(Emphasis mine.)

As clear as can be. Had I known this, I would never have purchased this iTunes gift card. And I do accept this restriction, though it seems quite arbitrary. But I personally find it rather strange that a statement about this restriction is buried in the FAQ instead of being included on the card itself.

What can I buy with an iTunes Gift Card or iTunes Gift Certificate?

iTunes Gift Cards and iTunes Gift Certificates can be used to purchase music, videos, TV shows, and audio books from the iTunes Store. At this time, iTunes Gift Cards and iTunes Gift Certificates are not accepted for online Apple Store purchases.

Since, as far as I know, iTunes gift cards can in fact be used to purchase applications, the omission is interesting. One might assume that application purchases are allowed “unless stated otherwise.” In fact, another difference between the two statements is quite intriguing: “At this time” iTunes Gift Cards are not accepted for online Apple Store purchases. While it may not mean anything about Apple Store purchases through iTunes cards in the future. But it does imply that they have been thinking about the possibility. As a significant part of Apple’s success has to do with its use of convenient payment systems, this “at this time” quote is rather intriguing.

So I feel rather dejected. Nothing extreme or tragic. But I feel at the same time disappointed and misled. I’ve had diverse experiences with Apple, in the past, some of which were almost epic. But this one is more frustrating, for a variety of reasons.

Sure, “it’s only 25$.” But I can do quite a lot with 25$. Yesterday, I bought two devices for just a bit more than this and I had been considering these purchases for a while. Altogether, the webcam, mouse, and Sudoku Daily were my holiday gifts to myself. Given my financial situation, these are not insignificant, in terms of money. I’ve had very positive experiences which cost much less than 25$, including some cost-free ones but also some reasonably-priced ones.

But it’s really not about the money. It’s partly about the principle: I hate being misled. When I do get misled by advertising, my attitude toward consumerism gets more negative. In this case, I get to think of Apple as representative of the flaws of consumerism. I’ve been a Mac geek since 1987 and I still enjoy Apple products. But I’m no Apple fanboy and occasions like these leave a surprisingly sour taste in my mouth.

The problem is compounded by the fact that Apple’s iTunes is a “closed ecosystem.” I listen respectfully to others who complain about Apple but I typically don’t have much of a problem with this lack of openness. Such a simple issue as not being able to use an iTunes gift card to purchase something on the iTunes App Store is enough to make me think about diverse disadvantages of the iTunes structure.

If it hadn’t been for the restrictive App Store, I could have purchased Enjoy Sudoku directly through Paypal. In fact, the developers already have a Paypal button for donations and I can assume that they’d be fine with selling the native application directly on their site. In the US, I could have purchased the application directly on iTunes with a US Paypal account. In this context, it now seems exceedingly strange that iTunes gift cards would not be usable on the iTunes App Store.

Which brings me back to a sore point with Apple: the company is frequently accused of “hating Canada.” Of course, the sentiment may be associated to Canadian jealousy over our neighbours in the United States. But Apple has done a number of things which have tended to anger Canadians. Perhaps the most obvious example was the fiasco over the Canadian iPhone as Rogers and Fido, Canada’s only cellphone providers for the iPhone, initially created such abusive plans that there was a very public outcry from people who wanted to purchase those cellphones. Rogers later changed its iPhone plans but the harm had been done. Apple may be seen as a victim, in this case, but the fiasco still gave credence to the notion that Apple hates Canada.

Yet this notion isn’t new. I personally remember diverse occasions through which Canadian users of Apple products had specific complaints about how we were treated. Much of the issues had to do with discrepancies over prices or problems with local customer support. And many of these were fairly isolated cases. But isolated incidents appear like a pattern to people if they’re burnt twice by the same flame.

Not that this means I’ll boycott Apple or that I’m likely to take part in one of those class action lawsuits which seem to “fall” on Apple with a certain regularity. But my opinion of Apple is much lower this afternoon than it has been in the past.

I’m sending the following to Apple Canada’s customer service (follow-up: 62621014). Not that I really expect a favourable resolution but I like to go on record about things like these.

I would like to either be credited 25$ for purchases on the App Store section of the iTunes store or reimbursed for this gift card.

I bought a 25$ iTunes gift card specifically to purchase applications on the App Store. The front of the card’s packaging says that I can use it “for music and more.” Nothing on the small print at the back of the packaging or on the card itself says that the card may not be used on the App Store. Even the legal terms of the card have no mention of this restriction:

iTunes Gift Cards and iTunes Gift Certificates can be used to purchase music, videos and audio books from the iTunes Store. iTunes Gift Cards and iTunes Gift Certificates may not be used on the Canadian store to purchase applications and games.

At this point, my impression is that what is taken as a “rule” on expertise is a simplification of results from a larger body of research with an emphasis on work by K. Anders Ericsson but with little attention paid to primary sources.
The whole process is quite satisfying, to me. Not just because we might all gain a better understanding of how this “claim” became so generalized, but because the process as a whole shows both powers and limitations of the Internet. I tend to claim (publicly) that the ‘Net favours critical thinking (because we eventually all claims with grains of salt). But it also seems that, even with well-known research done in English, it can be rather difficult to follow all the connections across the literature. If you think about more obscure work in non-dominant languages, it’s easy to realize that Google’s dream of organizing the world’s information isn’t yet true.

By the by, I do realize that my quest was based on a somewhat arbitrary assumption: that this “rule of thumb” is now understood as a solid rule. But what I’ve noticed in popular media since 2006 leads me to believe that the claim is indeed taken as a hard and fast rule.

I’m not blaming anyone, in this case. I don’t think that anyone’s involvement in the “chain of transmission” was voluntarily misleading and I don’t even think that it was that essential. As with many other ideas, what “sticks” is what seems to make sense in context. Actually, this strong tendency for “convenient” ideas to be more widely believed relates to a set of tricky issues with which academics have to deal, on a daily basis. Sagan’s well-known “baloney detector” is useful, here. But it’s also in not so wide use.

One thing which should also be clear: I’m not saying that Ericsson and other researchers have done anything shoddy or inappropriate. Their work is being used outside of its original context, which is often an issue.

In that post, Will Thalheimer traces back a well-known claim about learning to shoddy citations. While it doesn’t invalidate the base claim (that people tend to retain more information through certain cognitive processes), Thalheimer does a good job of showing how a graph which has frequently been seen in educational fields was based on faulty interpretation of work by prominent scholars, mixed with some results from other sources.

Quite interesting. IMHO, demystification and critical thinking are among the most important things we can do in academia. In fact, through training in folkloristics, I have become quite accustomed to this specific type of debunking.

I have in mind a somewhat similar claim that I’m currently trying to trace. Preliminary searches seem to imply that citations of original statements have a similar hyperbolic effect on the status of this claim.

The claim is what a type of “rule of thumb” in cognitive science. A generic version could be stated in the following way:

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – in anything.

More recently, during a keynote speech he was giving as part of his latest book tour, I heard a similar claim from presenter extraordinaire Malcolm Gladwell. AFAICT, this claim runs at the centre of Gladwell’s recent book: Outliers: The Story of Success. In fact, it seems that Gladwell uses the same quote from Levitin, on page 40 of Outliers (I just found that out).

I would like to pinpoint the origin for the claim. Contrary to Thalheimer’s debunking, I don’t expect that my search will show that the claim is inaccurate. But I do suspect that the “rule of thumb” versions may be a bit misled. I already notice that most people who set up such claims are doing so without direct reference to the primary literature. This latter comment isn’t damning: in informal contexts, constant referal to primary sources can be extremely cumbersome. But it could still be useful to clear up the issue. Who made this original claim?

I’ve tried a few things already but it’s not working so well. I’m collecting a lot of references, to both online and printed material. Apart from Levitin’s book and a few online comments, I haven’t yet read the material. Eventually, I’d probably like to find a good reference on the cognitive basis for expertise which puts this “rule of thumb” in context and provides more elaborate data on different things which can be done during that extensive “time on task” (including possible skill transfer).

But I should proceed somewhat methodically. This blogpost is but a preliminary step in this process.

Since Philip E. Ross is the first person on record I heard talk about this claim, a logical first step for me is to look through this SciAm article. Doing some text searches on the printable version of his piece, I find a few interesting things including the following (on page 4 of the standard version):

Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field.

Apart from the ten thousand (10,000) hours part of the claim, this is about as clear a statement as I’m looking for. The “Simon” in question is Herbert A. Simon, who did research on chess at the Department of Psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University with colleague William G. Chase. So I dig for diverse combinations of “Herbert Simon,” “ten(10)-year rule,” “William Chase,” “expert(ise),” and/or “chess.” I eventually find two primary texts by those two authors, both from 1973: (Chase and Simon, 1973a) and (Chase and Simon, 1973b).

The first (1973a) is an article from Cognitive Psychology 4(1): 55-81, available for download on ScienceDirect (toll access). Through text searches for obvious words like “hour*,” “year*,” “time,” or even “ten,” it seems that this article doesn’t include any specific statement about the amount of time required to become an expert. The quote which appears to be the most relevant is the following:

Behind this perceptual analysis, as with all skills (cf., Fitts & Posner, 1967), lies an extensive cognitive apparatus amassed through years of constant practice.

While it does relate to the notion that there’s a cognitive basis to practise, the statement is generic enough to be far from the “rule of thumb.”

The second Chase and Simon reference (1973b) is a chapter entitled “The Mind’s Eye in Chess” (pp. 215-281) in the proceedings of the Eighth Carnegie Symposium on Cognition as edited by William Chase and published by Academic Press under the title Visual Information Processing. I borrowed a copy of those proceedings from Concordia and have been scanning that chapter visually for some statements about the “time on task.” Though that symposium occurred in 1972 (before the first Chase and Simon reference was published), the proceedings were apparently published after the issue of Cognitive Psychology since the authors mention that article for background information.

I do find some interesting quotes, but nothing that specific:

By a rough estimate, the amount of time each player has spent playing chess, studying chess, and otherwise staring at chess positions is perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours for the Master; 1,000 to 5,000 hours for the Class A player; and less than 100 horus for the beginner. (Chase and Simon 1973b: 219)

or:

The organization of the Master’s elaborate repertoire of information takes thousands of hours to build up, and the same is true of any skilled task (e.g., football, music). That is why practice is the major independent variable in the acquisition of skill. (Chase and Simon 1973b: 279, emphasis in the original, last sentences in the text)

Maybe I haven’t scanned these texts properly but those quotes I find seem to imply that Simon hadn’t really devised his “10-year rule” in a clear, numeric version.

I could probably dig for more Herbert Simon wisdom. Before looking (however cursorily) at those 1973 texts, I was using Herbert Simon as a key figure in the origin of that “rule of thumb.” To back up those statements, I should probably dig deeper in the Herbert Simon archives. But that might require more work than is necessary and it might be useful to dig through other sources.

In my personal case, the other main written source for this “rule of thumb” is Dan Levitin. So, using online versions of his book, I look for comments about expertise. (I do own a copy of the book and I’m assuming the Index contains page numbers for references on expertise. But online searches are more efficient and possibly more thorough on specific keywords.) That’s how I found the statement, quoted above. I’m sure it’s the one which was sticking in my head and, as I found out tonight, it’s the one Gladwell used in his first statement on expertise in Outliers.

So, where did Levitin get this? I could possibly ask him (we’ve been in touch and he happens to be local) but looking for those references might require work on his part. A preliminary step would be to look through Levitin’s published references for Your Brain On Music.

Though Levitin is a McGill professor, Your Brain On Music doesn’t follow the typical practise in English-speaking academia of ladling copious citations onto any claim, even the most truistic statements. Nothing strange in this difference in citation practise. After all, as Levitin explains in his Bibliographic Notes:

This book was written for the non-specialist and not for my colleagues, and so I have tried to simplify topics without oversimplifying them.

In this context, academic-style citation-fests would make the book too heavy. Levitin does, however, provide those “Bibliographic Notes” at the end of his book and on the website for the same book. In the Bibliographic Notes of that site, Levitin adds a statement I find quite interesting in my quest for “sources of claims”:

Because I wrote this book for the general reader, I want to emphasize that there are no new ideas presented in this book, no ideas that have not already been presented in scientific and scholarly journals as listed below.

So, it sounds like going through those references is a good strategy to locate at least solid references on that specific “10,000 hour” claim. Among relevant references on the cognitive basis of expertise (in Chapter 7), I notice the following texts which might include specific statements about the “time on task” to become an expert. (An advantage of the Web version of these bibliographic notes is that Levitin provides some comments on most references; I put Levitin’s comments in parentheses.)

Ericsson, K. A., and J. Smith, eds. 1991. Toward a General Theory of Expertise: prospects and limits. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Psychological studies of expertise, including chess players)

Hayes, J. R. 1985. Three problems in teaching general skills. In Thinking and Learning Skills: Research and Open Questions, edited by S. F. Chipman, J. W. Segal and R. Glaser. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. (Source for the study of Mozart’s early works not being highly regarded, and refutation that Mozart didn’t need 10,000 hours like everyone else to become an expert.)

Sloboda, J. A. 1991. Musical expertise. In Toward a general theory of expertise, edited by K. A. Ericcson (sic) and J. Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Overview of issues and findings in musical expertise literature)

I have yet to read any of those references. I did borrow Ericsson and Smith when I first heard about Levitin’s approach to talent and expertise (probably through a radio and/or podcast appearance). But I had put the issue of expertise on the back-burner. It was always at the back of my mind and I did blog about it, back then. But it took Gladwell’s talk to wake me up. What’s funny, though, is that the “time on task” statements in (Ericsson and Smith, 1991) seem to lead back to (Chase and Simon, 1973b).

At this point, I get the impression that the “it takes a decade and/or 10,000 hours to become an expert”:

was originally proposed as a vague hypothesis a while ago (the year 1899 comes up);

became an object of some consideration by cognitive psychologists at the end of the 1960s;

became more widely accepted in the 1970s;

was tested by Benjamin Bloom and others in the 1980s;

was precised by Ericsson and others in the late 1980s;

gained general popularity in the mid-2000s;

is being further popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in late 2008.

Of course, I’ll have to do a fair bit of digging and reading to verify any of this, but it sounds like the broad timeline makes some sense. One thing, though, is that it doesn’t really seem that anybody had the intention of spelling it out as a “rule” or “law” in such a format as is being carried around. If I’m wrong, I’m especially surprised that a clear formulation isn’t easier to find.

As an aside, of sorts… Some people seem to associate the claim with Gladwell, at this point. Not very surprsing, given the popularity of his books, the effectiveness of his public presentations, the current context of his book tour, and the reluctance of the general public to dig any deeper than the latest source.

The problem, though, is that it doesn’t seem that Gladwell himself has done anything to “set the record straight.” He does quote Levitin in Outliers, but I heard him reply to questions and comments as if the research behind the “ten years or ten thousand hours” claim had some association with him. From a popular author like Gladwell, it’s not that awkward. But these situations are perfect opportunities for popularizers like Gladwell to get a broader public interested in academia. As Gladwell allegedly cares about “educational success” (as measured on a linear scale), I would have expected more transparency.

Ah, well…

So, I have some work to do on all of this. It will have to wait but this placeholder might be helpful. In fact, I’ll use it to collect some links.

In that video, a man is “sent to the doghouse” (a kind of prison for insensitive men) because he offered a vacuum cleaner to his wife. It’s part of a marketing campaign through which men are expected to buy diamonds to their wives and girlfriends.

For instance, that site makes use of Facebook Connect as a way to tap viewers’ online social network. FC is a relatively new feature (the general release was last week) and few sites have been putting it to the test. In this campaign’s case, a woman can use her Facebook account to connect to her husband or boyfriend and either send him a warning about his insensitivity to her needs (of diamonds) or “put him in the doghouse.” From a social media perspective, it can accurately be described as “neat.”

The site also uses Share This to facilitate the video‘s diffusion through various social media services, from WordPress.com to Diigo. This tends to be an effective strategy to encourage “viral marketing.” (And, yes, I fully realize that I actively contribute to this campaign’s “viral spread.”)

Simply put, I think that this campaign would fare rather badly in Quebec because of its use of culturally inappropriate gender stereotypes.

As I write this post, I receive feedback from Swedish ethnomusicologist Maria Ljungdahl who shares some insight about gender stereotypes. As Maria says, the stereotypes in this ad are “global.” But my sense is that these “global stereotypes” are not that compatible with local culture, at least among Québécois (French-speaking Quebeckers).

See, as a Québécois born and raised as a (male) feminist, I tend to be quite gender-conscious. I might even say that my gender awareness may be somewhat above the Québécois average and gender relationships are frequently used in definitions of Québécois identity.

In Québécois media, advertising campaigns portraying men as naïve and subservient have frequently been discussed. Ten or so years ago, these portrayals were a hot topic (searches for Brault & Martineau, Tim Hortons, and Un gars, une fille should eventually lead to appropriate evidence). Current advertising campaigns seem to me more subtle in terms of male figures, but careful analysis would be warranted as discussions of those portrayals are more infrequent than they have been in the past.

That video and campaign are, to me, very US-specific. Because I spent a significant amount of time in Indiana, Massachusetts, and Texas, my initial reaction while watching the video had more to do with being glad that it wasn’t the typical macrobrewery-style sexist ad. This reaction also has to do with the context for my watching that video as I was unclear as to the gender perspective of the friend who sent me the link (a male homebrewer from the MidWest currently living in Texas).

By the end of the video, however, I reverted to my Québécois sensibility. I also reacted to the obvious commercialism, partly because one of my students has been working on engagement rings in our material culture course.

But my main issue was with the presumed insensitivity of men.

Granted, part of this is personal. I define myself as a “sweet and tendre man” and I’m quite happy about my degree of sensitivity, which may in fact be slightly higher than average, even among Québécois. But my hunch is that this presumption of male insensitivity may not have very positive effects on the perception of such a campaign. Québécois watching this video may not groan but they may not find it that funny either.

See, such perceived generational groups as “Baby Boomers” and “Generation X” need not be defined as monolithic, monadic, bounded entities and they have none of the problems associated with notions of “ethnicity” in the general public. “Generations” aren’t “faraway tribes” nor do they imply complete isolation. Some people may tend to use “generational” labels in such terms that they appear clearly defined (“Baby Boomers are those individuals born between such and such years”). And there is some confusion between this use of “historical generations” and what the concept of “generation” means in, say, the study of kinship systems. But it’s still relatively easy to get people to think about generations in cultural terms: they’re not “different cultures” but they still seem to be “culturally different.”

Going back to gender… The JC Penney marketing campaign visibly lumps together people of different ages. The notion seems to be that doghouse-worthy male insensitivity isn’t age-specific or related to inexperience. The one man who was able to leave the doghouse based on his purchase of diamonds is relatively “age-neutral” as he doesn’t really seem to represent a given age. Because this attempt at crossing age divisions seems so obvious, I would assume that it came in the context of perceived differences in gender relationships. Using the logic of those who perceive the second part of the 20th Century as a period of social emancipation, one might presume that younger men are less insensitive than older men (who were “brought up” in a cultural context which was “still sexist”). If there are wide differences in the degree of sensitivity of men of different ages, a campaign aiming at a broad age range needs to diminish the importance of these differences. “The joke needs to be funny to men of all ages.”

The Quebec context is, I think, different. While we do perceive the second part of the 20th Century (and, especially, the 1970s) as a period of social emancipation (known as the “Quiet Revolution” or «Révolution Tranquille»), the degree of sensitivity to gender issues appears to be relatively level, across the population. At a certain point in time, one might have argued that older men were still insensitive (at the same time as divorcées in their forties might have been regarded as very assertive) but it seems difficult to make such a distinction in the current context.

All this to say that the JC Penney commercial is culturally inappropriate for Québécois society? Not quite. Though the example I used was this JC Penney campaign, I’m thinking about broader contexts for Québécois identity (for a variety of personal reasons, including the fact that I have been back in Québec for several months, now).

My claim is…

Ethnographic field research would go a long way to unearth culturally appropriate categories which might eventually help marketers cater to Québécois.

Of course, the agency which produced that JC Penney ad (Saatchi & Saatchi) was targeting the US market (JC Penney doesn’t have locations in Quebec) and I received the link through a friend in the US. But it was an interesting opportunity for me to think and write about a few issues related to the cultural specificity of gender stereotypes.